NakedSushi

Putting the strategy into strategy rpg, La Pucelle Tactics is a game well worth the 40 hours to complete. The graphics and sound may be dated, considering this is a PS2 game, but what it lacks in eye candy, it makes up for in brain candy.

At times, the game seemed overly simplified, but at the last chapter, I wished I had leveled up more in the previous chapters. It wasn’t until the second to the last chapter that I put some work into leveling up my character’s equipments. While the game had a fairly good basic tutorial, it didn’t cover advanced topics like leveling weapons and learning better special skills.

As good as the game was, I only had a few complaints. Saving was done through the world map or the battle map menu. Most of the time, that’s not a problem, but there are portions, in the game, mainly boss battles, where the game doesn’t give the player a chance to save before going into battles. Some of the battles are several maps long and there’s no where to save between maps.

Another complaint I had was that sometimes, main characters would be taken away for some time because of the plot. When the character returns, or a new member is added to the group, the character is several levels below the rest of the group, which makes it troublesome because the player would need to do some side battles in order to bring the newly added character up to the same level as the rest.

Other than those few complaints, the game was enjoyable, especially after I switched from the American voices to Japanese voices. There’s one demon whose American voice-actor made him sound like a flaming gay man who couldn’t act. That was funny for a while, but after about the fourth dialog box, I couldn’t stand it anymore and switched to the Japanese voices. I suggest anyone who plays La Pucelle to do the same.